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Intelisys Wednesday urged its telecom partners to embrace the "mass VAR migration" that's sweeping the telco channel, as a means to not only grow their businesses but to also "get rich doing it."

"Don't miss the mass VAR migration," said Andrew Pryfogle, Intelisys' senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Services and Complex Bids, during the opening session of Intelisys' Channel Connect event, taking place this week in San Francisco. "We have added a bunch of partners to our community in the past year. But, get this: 57 percent of the partners that have entered the Intelisys community this year alone are VARs."

Pryfogle told Intelisys partners that the telecom agents most poised for growth are those that choose to work with VARs.

"The smart, forward-thinking sales partners in the room -- and that's a whole bunch of you -- are thinking about how they are positioning their businesses to take advantage of this mass migration of VARs," Pryfogle said. "There is an enormous opportunity."

In August, Intelisys introduced a new version of its Advanced Commissions Program that lets partners choose how they want to receive commissions on cloud and carrier service deals. The aim of the program, Pryfogle said at the time, is to help solution providers maintain the up-front cash flow they've traditionally relied on to run their business while still building up a long-term recurring revenue base.

Intelisys also offers a Channel Alignment Program, which pairs IT solution providers with Intelisys telecom agents to help ease solution providers into the cloud and carrier services business.

Aaron Loehr, CEO of Stratacore, a Seattle-based Intelisys agent specializing in data center, cloud and connectivity services, said he has seen an uptick in the number of VARs Stratacore works with over the past couple of years. Loehr said he especially looks to partner with VARs outside of the Seattle area, as a means to grow Stratacore's national footprint. VARs will work with Stratacore to either serve as referral partner or create their own dedicated agent business by leveraging Stratacore's expertise and resources, he said.

"We see VARs as a big part of our growth strategy, especially if they are out of region," Loehr said. "We are signing them up to become agents of their own, or as a referral partner. If it's the right fit, we are open to making it work."

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